Did you know that Monday, March 8 is International Women’s Day? I didn’t, until I received the following email notification from the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC), an organization I follow that promotes communication as a means for social change. Here is the note from WACC.
The UN theme for International Women’s Day 2009 is ‘Women and men united to end violence against women and girls’. The Global Media Monitoring Project coordinated by the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC) in 2005 found that only 1% of news stories worldwide focus on gender-based violence. Yet, according to UNIFEM (the UN Development Fund for Women) ‘violence against women and girls is a problem of pandemic proportions. At least one out of every three women around the world has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused in her lifetime’. The Who Makes the News? report of the 2005 Global Media Monitoring Project observes that ‘Innumerable events and incidents of gender-based violence occur daily but news values and news priorities apparently decree that these are not ‘newsworthy’. Their scale and magnitude is thus hidden from the public. Here is a list of events scheduled in the US to support International Women’s Day. What do you think about these statistics? This event? |
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